I have a little Linksys BEFSR41 firewall/router that I use at home.. and have a few machines behind that. One of the neat features of the Linksys is that it can do port forwarding. So if a request comes in on say port 80 you can forward that request on to a particular machine behind the firewall. The limitation I’ve found on this is that it only forwards to one IP address.
I have a little Linksys BEFSR41 firewall/router that I use at home.. and have a few machines behind that. One of the neat features of the Linksys is that it can do port forwarding. So if a request comes in on say port 80 you can forward that request on to a particular machine behind the firewall. The limitation I’ve found on this is that it only forwards to one IP address. So if I’m running a Windows 2000 server and want to run a bunch of web sites off of that server I have to use the “Host Header” technique to determine which web site the server should serve up for each request (requests for all of the web sites come in on the same IP address).
Now Win2k server can disntinguish which web server should handle each request three ways: IP address, Host Header, or Port. Since the Linksys will only forward one port to one IP address the only solution I’ve been able to find is to have the different domains for the different web servers mapped to unique ports. So if you send a request to ABCDEF.com your request would be forwarded to 192.168.145.12:80 (port 80)but if you send a request to FEDCBA.com your request would be forwarded to 192.168.145.12:84 (port 84).
Obviously if you have access to your own DNS server you can handle this yourself.. but if you need a DNS service here’s one that is capable of converting that domain name you have around into an IP address AND a port number:
http://www.dynu.com/
http://www.no-ip.com/
The only catch.. you’ll be paying each year for the service..
